Sunday, 30 September 2012

"JOB CREATOR" - the lie that reveals the Plutocracy

Here Dan Carlin suggests (with the aid of James Goldsmith's prescient book The Trap) that most Western politics right now are a charade, and that the debate on jobs is a complete sham, hiding the fact that most middle class jobs are now gone abroad, for good.

With this in mind it is incredible to hear that the main justification for further tax cuts for the rich, when national governments all over are running gigantic deficits, is to allow the rich to be JOB CREATORS.

The one thing you will immediately know from the use of the term "JOB CREATOR" is that the person using "JOB CREATOR" is treating you like a fool, because the jobs being being referred to won't be created anywhere near your neighbourhood.

The JOB CREATORS dodge tax in your country to open factories run like Third World Victorian deathtraps. And when standards improve in their factories and costs get too much they move onto other third world workforce's primed for exploitation (as we've seen already from US companies relocating to Mexico in the 1990s and and now moving again further south when wages and conditions are forced to improve).

And the cheap goods we get out of exploiting this system are offset when the goods jobs we need to pay for them disappear. How many westerners will have buy their new IPhone 5s on the same credit that has caused so much damage since 2008?

I remember when globalisation was sold to us in the west as inevitable and the best method of global wealth distribution. To lift the third world out of poverty the rich first world may have to suffer for a while but it would be fair. We were sold this by the Third Way progressives like Blair and Clinton as much as anyone. They seemed to achieve little else actually. It has puzzled my for a long time that progressive leaders elected in huge landslide wins seem to achieve very little (Obama's first term, 11 years of Tony Blair) while right wing leaders elected with tiny majorities somehow instigate huge social change (Thatchers first term, Bush Jnrs first term).

In the 90s Globalisation was consensus politics. I remember saying it myself as a standard economics A level solution. Global trade: where the Great Depression went wrong and how well do it right. More Global Trade. Economic fairness. Why bother showering the worlds poor with aid when we can give them jobs?

Well, globalisation turned out to be less lifting the worlds poor out if poverty and more lifting the multinational political economic elite out of the reach of their domestic tax systems. This was revealed ever more starkly in the banking crisis when national governments were forced to bend the knee and pay for insane business practices of itinerant economic gamblers already living in a fantasy world beyond economic responsibility. These elites now have such a stranglehold on the worlds media they can sell even ludicrous facts like Mitt Romney paying a lower tax rate than his servants as an economically and socially desirable.

If the pain of globalisation were being felt equally it would not be a problem but that is not the way it has happened. The society we've globalised is not that of the 1950s and 1960s. It is the world of the 1880s and 1890s, and those glittering worlds of the rich and privileged did not last long, even in an era when materialism was less of a religion then it is now. Those London riots last year were as much a desire to steal back material wealth as much as anything. Perhaps we are about to globalise these as well.
For those driving the Globalisation train, and those most obviously defending it with your "JOB CREATOR" fantasies for Western voters, I hope you enjoy the security state you are building for yourselves. Let us hope the fascist police you will need to enforce it continue to behave like your servants; like the rest of us will have to.